Last Wednesday, on the last day of Black History Month, the UC-Berkeley Daily Californian published an advertisement titled "Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Slavery is a Bad Idea--and Racist Too."

The next day, editor-in-chief Daniel Hernandez entered his newsroom only to face a group of staffers furious about the ad. They were shortly joined by 40 protestors--led by one of the newspaper's own columnists.

Hernandez said the protestors began yelling at him, calling the advertisement a "travesty," tearing up copies of the newspaper and demanding an apology right then and there.

Hernandez and other top editors immediately convened a meeting at which a decisive majority voted to run a front-page apology, with a longer explanation inside the paper.

"We realize that the ad allowed the Daily Cal to become an inadvertent vehicle for bigotry," the apology reads.

The same ad was sent to about 30 other college newspapers. At UC-Davis, another school that ran the advertisement last Wednesday, about 75 people protested in front of the school's student union. By the next morning, their newspaper, too, had published an apology.

The ad--and the apologies--drew national media attention and sparked intense controversy, inspiring scores of letters to the editor--400 e-mails at the Daily Californian alone.

The ad that inspired the protests was written by David Horowitz, a left-wing 1960s activist who once worked with the Black Panthers and who now considers himself conservative. His Center for the Study of Popular Culture, bankrolled by thousands of individual contributors, as well as the Bradley Foundation and other conservative groups, paid for the ads.

The ad says "there is no single group responsible for the crime of slavery" and claims "reparations to African Americans have already been paid...in the form of welfare benefits and racial preferences."

It dismisses parallels to Holocaust reparations and payments to black participants in the Tuskegee syphilis study and disputes claims that African Americans today suffer economic hardship because of slavery.

The Crimson received the same advertisement that the California papers did but decided not to print it.

"The ad was written in a style that seemed as though it sought solely to aggravate our readers, and we didn't feel comfortable running it unedited," said Crimson President C. Matthew MacInnis '02. "Horowitz' advertisement was largely editorial in content and as such he is welcome to submit his piece as an editorial submission where it would be subject to the same standards of editing and fact-checking as our other editorial pieces. We don't believe it is ethical to allow individuals to purchase advertisements as a means by which to circumvent the editorial process."

The Crimson wrote Horowitz last night, offering to consider an opinion piece on slavery reparations.

But he replied: "Since your editors have censored my ad, why would I have any reason to believe that they would accept anything I wrote on this subject for publication?"